Author: Sarah Frances Dias

I am an artist and an architect, currently pursuing my PhD in Architecture at the Faculty of Architecture of Lisbon, with the theme of 'Significance and Meaning in Art: Architecture and Painting'. When I am not researching and reading, I am in my studio painting... which is most of the time. In the in-between I am drawing, sketching, writing, thinking, running or finding inspiration out there in the world. I am in love with all things creative and fulled by a desire for an emotionally purposeful and soulful kind of existence.

Matisse’s ‘Still life with a Magnolia’ (1942), and its apparent Simplified drawing is nothing of the sorts. Rather, the painting, that took more than 12 years to complete, is not only a revolutionary way to represent life, it is also representative of Matisse’s underlying idea that colour possesses great healing powers and that art has the strength to communicate to the soul of man in mysterious ways. A man that believed in the greatness of beauty despite all the tragedies he lived through, he infamously, and very correctly, claimed: ” There are always flowers for those who want to see them.”…. just one of the many significances embodied in this little masterpiece.

No matter how many instruments man invents across the ages, to measure, define or organize time, the world will never be defined by time or by time’s keepers for that matter. Instead it will always be ruled by all of the things that exist outside of it… immeasurable substances, that do not follow earthly rules, or respond to “dimensional” dictums, but rather to the other invisible systems that co-exist with this material world. These things live, not in clocks and broken logics…. but somewhere both far and close… both in the heart and in the vastness of the universe….giving life to our cells, granting sparkles to the stars and always making sure that what survives of this life is not the bones or ashes, but the fluttering essence of all that is worth saving……. love.

” If having a soul means being able to feel love and loyalty and gratitude, then animals are better off than a lot of humans.” James Herriot

” Let us remember that animals are not mere resources for human consumption. They are splendid beings in their own right, who have evolved alongside us as co-inheritors of all the beauty and abundance of life on this planet” Marc Bekoff

‘’ Some people come, some people go. Some come to teach you how to love, others to teach you how to let go… Some things burn to ashes, before they have even begun, others are built, day by day, slowly and patiently. It’s beautiful… this ever revolving push and pull of life, isn’t it? This not knowing, which is which? Maybe the destruction is a construction… and the things we think we are building, slowly, are the ones that are burning after all. Maybe it’s all exactly the same thing. ‘’

” ﻿Nature is ever at work building and pulling down, creating and destroying, keeping everything whirling and flowing, allowing no rest but in rhythmical motion, chasing everything in endless song out of one beautiful form into another.” John Muir﻿